Reclaim Your Game (RYG), a self-proclaimed DRM watchdog organization for the gaming community, released results of its testing of ByteShield and Sony SecuROM DRMs last week. The San Francisco-based ByteShield achieved RYG’s highest rating of “End-User Friendly” in each of eight categories, thereby meriting RYG’s Gold Seal of Approval. SecuROM DRM, on the other hand, garnered an “End-User Friendly” rating in only one category, a “Tolerable” in another, and “Unacceptable” or “Unfriendly” in the remaining six.

RYG established itself in May 2008 in response to uproars over SecuROM in games such as Spore and Mass Effect. It has evolved a rigorous testing methodology that rates gaming DRMs by looking for these signs of consumer-unfriendliness:

The DRM installs hidden files.

It installs without the user’s knowledge and consent.

It performs online hardware activations.

It blacklists (restricts use of) hardware and software on the user’s PC.

The vendor’s website information, customer service and tech support are unacceptable.

To earn RYG’s Gold Seal of Approval, a DRM must score over a threshold in each of the categories ranging from 80 to 100 percent.

Other major gaming DRMs including Ubisoft’s StarForce and Trymedia ActiveMark (RealNetworks) have yet to be tested.

It is truly refreshing to see an organization like this conduct what appears to be rigorous testing of the consumer-friendliness of DRMs rather than just declaring DRM to be unacceptable in any form. RYG deserves much credit: it attracted lots of attention in its initial days with a site called “SecuROM Must Be Destroyed,” then parlayed the traffic into something of practical value for the industry instead of yet another source of cheap ranting.

The Federal Trade Commission, which held hearings on consumer labelling of DRM features last February (which RYG attended), would do well to look at what RYG is doing. A consumer protection agency, not what appears to be an all-volunteer organization, should be doing this type of work. The only other serious attempt I have seen to do this was the Center for Democracy and Technology’s 2006 white paper, Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World. But even that was a set of guidelines for reviewers and not a source of reviews itself.

ByteShield has apparently been working with the folks at RYG to design its DRM to maximize its RYG test results. If so, that’s a good thing. It means that RYG is becoming a representative of consumers’ interests in the market in a real, palpable way, not just through rhetoric.

Reclaim Your Game, an organization that acts as a watchdog over DRM for computer games, has issued a statement endorsing the DRM/product activation technology from ByteShield as “safe, transparent, and non-invasive on your PC.” They praised the vendor for its full disclosure and willingness to engage in cosntructive dialog with the gaming community.

RYG arose out of the controversy over product activation requirements that Electronic Arts put into its games Mass Effect PC and Spore a year ago, which led to a huge backlash among gamers and boycott threats. (Product Activation is a technology related to DRM that is widely used on software and games. For example, Microsoft uses its own Product Activation technology for Windows, Office, and other products.) Electronic Arts has been using the SecuROM CD-based product activation technology from Sony.

ByteShield has been taking advantage of the backlash against SecuROM to present itself as a more gamer-friendly alternative that still does its best to deter unauthorized use. The company’s dialog with RYG followed from a conversation between them at the recent FTC DRM Town Hall on disclosure of DRM features — evidence that the Town Hall was effective, ironically, in promoting voluntary disclosure.

The backlash against EA and SecuROM, and the detente between ByteShield and RYG, are firm evidence that market forces do actually matter in the development of DRM technology – especially when the buyer and the approver of the technology are the same entity.

On a different subject: It’s time for my first Twitter experiment. I will be tweeting from the Copyright Summit next week in Washington. Please feel free to follow my tweets. I’ll be there for the first day of the event.